Peter Thiel Quotes

Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.

The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

I do think Bitcoin is the first [encrypted money] that has the potential to do something like change the world.

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present.

Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.

Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.

In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.

The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.

Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.

Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.

When you are starting a new business you don't want to go after giant markets. You want to go after small markets and take over those markets quickly.

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

There are only two kinds of businesses in this world: Businesses in crazy competition, and businesses that are one of a kind.

If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now?

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.

Every time we create something new we go from zero to one.

We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.

Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.

You want to be the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable.

Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans.

If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.

First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.

Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.

Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them.

Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.

We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.

What valuable company is nobody building?

Secrets are hard but solvable problems and we should talk about them. It's hard to work toward a radically better future if you don't believe in secrets.

I'm skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education.... People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it's very unclear how viable they are in many cases.

Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation.

Competition is overrated. In practice it is quite destructive and should be avoided wherever possible. Much better than fighting for scraps in existing markets is to create and own new ones.

Forget startup companies. The next frontier is startup countries.

Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.

In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.

The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.

All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

The something of somewhere is mostly just the nothing of nowhere.

By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready-for nothing in particular.

There are many more secrets in the world that are waiting to be found. The question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start.

Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed.

If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.

The value of failure is greatly over-rated. It's a preposterous myth.